Far Cry 2 Review

Ubisoft Montreal delivers a shooter like no other.

So yes, the quest structure can get tedious, but the open-world design helps alleviate some of the fatigue of repetition that might start to set in by giving you free range to do whatever you want. Assuming you've got some of the more interesting weapons unlocked, you can approach from any angle and choose to engage the enemy with rockets, sniper fire, or peg one of the ubiquitous explosive barrels or propane tanks to start a fire, which isn't as useless a move as it might seem to be.

Aside from being a pretty effect as it spreads across fields, engulfs trees, and causes chain reaction explosions if there are other combustible elements nearby, fire does play a significant role in the world of Far Cry 2. It's not always useful -- dense jungle underbrush won't burn nearly as effectively as savannah grass -- but when you get a large blaze going, it's a workable deterrent against enemy pursuers, as they'll actively try to avoid its rapid spread, buying you a few extra seconds to heal up, unjam a rusty weapon, or find something to hide behind.

Working with NPC 'buddies' can occasionally produce interesting results.

You'll be doing a lot of hiding in the game as the enemies tend to be pretty smart. This is an important point to make for an open-world game, and even more so because it's a first-person shooter and not a statistic-heavy first-person role-playing game, like The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. In a first-person shooter, we expect a play style centered more on twitch skills than character level or item attributes. In Far Cry 2, the gunplay feels great. Shotguns pop and thud with heavy sounds and have a good sense of weight to them. Enemies fly back as they're pelted with SMG fire, crumple to the ground after a well-aimed sniper bullet, and keel over after a headshot with a .50 caliber pistol. There are also unpredictable elements, like gun jams if you're just picking up enemies' guns from the ground, something that can be avoided by using the store-bought models. Rockets don't always fire correctly, but when they explode you get gouts of satisfying flame, trees swaying and underbrush twittering from the shock, debris whirling into the air and floating off in whichever direction the breeze is blowing, and ideally a large-scale brush fire. It's quite a rush, even after 20 or 30 times, to lob an explosive at a group of vehicles clogged on one of the roads after a lengthy pursuit, violently blasting aside any foes who didn't manage to scurry out of the way beforehand.

Scrambling away from grenade tosses isn't the only example of solid enemy AI; foes generally seem to possess a sense of the world. They'll fire at you when you pop out in the open, move around to avoid bullets, toss grenades, hop into vehicles and give chase when you run through their camps, and even try to run you off the road while pelting you with mounted weapon fire or run directly into you if you hop out of the car. While engaged in battle, if you duck behind some cover and run around to a different hiding spot without popping into view, enemies won't know exactly where you've gone. So you'll see them poke around in your original location and call out to each other about what they've found. If the game's not enough of a challenge for you on normal, you can then bump up the difficulty to the two higher settings where you'll get less health-replenishing syrettes and take more damage.

The AI isn't perfect, though, as is often the case in open-world games. Like with S.T.A.L.K.E.R., you'll sometimes run into glitched-out foes who stand still no matter how many times you shoot them. At points, enemies in the distance won't recognize that you've hit one of their compatriots, even if there's an explosion of blood right next to them. Others will run right by you in broad daylight without spinning to fire, which may have been intentional, but it's hard to tell. Ultimately they're all forgivable glitches, and certainly less frequent than in a product as bug-riddled as S.T.A.L.K.E.R., but they're more obvious because, for the majority of the game, the AI works well.

One of the many vehicles you'll pilot.

Between random fights against roving patrols, guard posts, and the towns in which mission goals are often set, you'll be doing a lot of traveling in Far Cry 2, which feels more out of place than it probably should. After all, any MMO gamer or RPG fanatic should be used to uneventful travel time to reach specific targets or areas. Maybe it's simply a consequence of Far Cry 2's relatively new design as a first-person shooter in an open world with minimal loading. Still, the first-person shooter genre's longstanding relationship with non-stop action makes the lengthy travel times seem odd here.

It's cut down, however, by your ability to hop into trucks, cars or boats to speed across terrain, which you'll be doing fairly often and which, unfortunately, don't have much of a feel to them. There are also fast-travel buses that, after a load screen, bring you near-instantly to another portion of the map. Enemy vehicle patrols and the tendency for other alerted foes to give chase in vehicles also ensures you're never lonely for long while traversing the terrain, which can get annoying, yet a lot of the navigation works against another of Far Cry 2's potential strengths: immersion.

When you're low on health and in danger of bleeding out, you're required to perform grisly self-surgeries. Ripping bullets out of your arms and legs with pliers and short knives is a regular occurrence, and you'll also witness gruesome events like yanking long shards of glass or twigs from limbs. The game puts a heavy emphasis on keeping you in a first-person perspective, keeping you rooted in that view throughout practically the entire game. If you sprint for too long, your screen blurs as you catch your breath. You'll see ferns bend in front of you as you walk over them, instead of just passing through them like a hallucination. If you aim down the sights of your gun, the edges of the screen blur to represent a more focused vision. The perspective can be especially powerful when determining if wounded friendlies should live or die. During missions you'll find your buddy NPCs will sometimes get shot down, and you'll have a choice of whether to inject them with a syrette to save them or kill them right there, all with your view directly in front of their pleading face.